The idea for this zine came when I read an anonymous Facebook post on a friend’s page several months ago. The post was about why protest matters. I shared the words on my own Facebook page and asked friends to add their responses to the list.

As months passed, I found myself trying to explain why protest matters to several children and young people I love. I started wondering if others were having similar conversations in their communities and if they needed a resource to help frame those discussions. So I decided to make a zine that included crowdsourced responses from social media to the question: ‘Why Protest?’

In addition to words from my Facebook friends and some Twitter followers, the zine includes photos by my friend, movement photographer, Sarah Jane Rhee of Love and Struggle Photos and from my personal collection of vintage images. The zine was generously designed by Megan Doty who I connected with through Design Volunteers.

‘Why Protest?’ is available for free downloading in the hope that everyone who can will make their own copies to share with their communities. Hand the zine out at protests, use it to start discussions about why protest matters, and pass it along to the people in your lives who are newly engaged in politics. Protest is just a start and is only one form of action that contributes to social change & justice. In the end, we need to organize if we want to build power.

Last Fall, I participated in a discussion about abolition at NYU Law School. Video and audio is now available online.

This colloquium featured a series of intersectional talks given by four community organizers, a movement lawyer, a poet, and a scholar who shared their work and reflections on abolition and building viable alternatives to policing and incarceration. Recordings of the talks, as well as the dialogue and Q&A that followed, are posted below in the order they were presented.

Watch all of the video here. I particularly appreciated the talk given by Dr. Liat Ben Moshe which focused on intersections between disability justice and abolition. I’m posting that video below. Also, you can listen to my talk here.

I’m a founding member of a formation called Survived and Punished. We came together in 2015 to leverage the work that our individual organizations are doing around the criminalization of survivors of violence in order to build collective power.

This week S & P is highlighting the cases of several women and gender non-confirming people who have been criminalized for survival and self-defense. The week of action kicked off with a focus on Bresha Meadows. The following video created by Love and Protect (one of the groups that is part of Survived and Punished) illustrates a solidarity action that was organized in support of Bresha in Chicago.

This week, my fellow Survived and Punished member Alisa Bierria and I co-wrote an op-ed (published In These Times) about the need to prioritize criminalized survivors in the Trump era even as we continue to fight for decarceration:

“On the eve of his inauguration, we think that it’s critical to ask what impact Trump will have on the criminal punishment system—and in particular, on criminalized survivors of violence like Bresha. We must carefully consider how to organize around prison and criminal legal issues in this new context. There will be a scramble to prioritize issues that need our attention and advocacy. It’s important that the experiences of criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence not be lost in the shuffle.”

Learn about the other criminalized survivors featured during this week of action here.

How can we defend each other? One way is to interrupt racist and transphobic attacks without calling the police (unless you are asked to). This new video has tips for how to respond, and talks about going beyond reacting to individual incidents, and getting involved with organizing for systemic change.

The video is narrated by Aaryn M. Lang, and was produced by friends at Barnard Center for Research on Women – BCRW and Project NIA, including Lewis Wallace. It’s part of a broader pre-inauguration collaboration with Mariame Kaba (me), the American Friends Service Committee, Showing up for Racial Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, Black Lives Matter and a bunch of individual teachers and librarians around the country to create and distribute cultural responses to white supremacy and rising racist violence.

Watch and most importantly share the video far and wide. It’s a great resource.

Also there is an accompanying arts-based curriculum that can be accessed here.

I greatly appreciate Critical Resistance’s work. Last year, they curated several conversations about abolition. I was privileged to participate in one of them. The video for that is forthcoming. For now, please watch long-time abolitionist organizers Rachel Herzing and Dylan Rodriguez in conversation.

Every month, I will be posting concrete actions that we can take in the ongoing struggle for more justice. Victoria Safford shared a quote from someone in an essay that I appreciate very much: “You know we cannot do this all at once. But every day offers every one of us little invitations for resistance, and you make your own responses.” I love the idea of “little invitations for resistance.” The question before all of us, I think, is ‘what will we make of this moment in history?’ One thing I know for sure is that we need to build our *action* muscles. We need to get outside of ourselves and act (both individually and collectively). This is my small contribution to encouraging more of us to act (together).

2. Organize a community meeting to resist Trump (sorry I had to unlink this because emails were coming directly to me for some reason. Google moveon.org to find relevant info) and to discuss the importance of #Medicare4All among other issues. Sign up through Moveon.org to host a meeting and/or to attend a meeting in your community on January 15.

7. Join or organize a rally/action on January 15 as part of the “Our First Stand: Save Healthcare” mobilization called by Congressional Democrats and led by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Details are presumably forthcoming.

First, the reminder: radical queers, trans people, black people, Muslims, incarcerated people, Native Americans, immigrants and the undocumented, people with disabilities, and those who live at the intersections of these identities—all have lived with this discomfort and terror for decades or centuries. So, to watch this may feel like a nightmare unfolding, but its contours are not new.

Unfortunately, marginalized people have often appeared in liberal and Democratic efforts as tokens, people whose lives and value have been invoked in order to win elections but whose humanity has been negated by actual policy. In particular, too many liberals have been complacent toward mass incarceration, police violence and global militarized capitalism, which have kept whole groups of people vulnerable and unsafe in the U.S. and around the world.

Even before this election, we have been asking for something bigger, something more visionary than token diversity: A world in which Black lives really do matter. A world in which trans bodies are celebrated and safe. An end to white supremacist policies of incarceration and border control that take many lives each year. Economic justice and a rebuke of neoliberalism and privatization of basic needs like water, a demand that people across the globe have access to land, work, water, shelter and power.

These are beautiful possibilities, full of hope and solidarity. And yet when we ask for those things as a comprehensive vision, we are portrayed as absurd, as outsiders with impossible dreams.